New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) would improve everyone’s lives, increase our free time, empower workers, and ensure everyone has food and a roof over their head. These are noble goals, but obviously there’s a downside or it would already be implemented, right?
Chronic mania and persistent euphoric states
Can a human be happy all the time?
Tihle: A new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators
Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development…
Why Credit Card Fraud Is Still a Thing
Most of the civilized world years ago shifted to requiring computer chips in payment cards that make it far more expensive and difficult for thieves to clone and use them for fraud. One notable exception is the United States, which is still lurching toward this goal. Here’s a look at the havoc that lag has wrought, as…
Teaching GPT-3 to Identify Nonsense
In Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test, Kevin Lacker found that GPT-3 does well answering simple factual questions like “Who was president of the United States in 1955?”, but also happily answered absurd qu…
Zoom Security Exploit: Cracking private meeting passwords
Short version: Zoom meetings were default protected by a 6 digit numeric password, meaning 1 million maximum passwords. I discovered a vulnerability in the Zoom web…
1.1B Taxi Rides Using OmniSciDB and a MacBook Pro
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBA
Non-trivial tips for database development
The Antitrust Hearing, the Role of Congress, CEO Questions
Congress is exactly where discussions about tech and society should be happening. Then, a list of questions for every tech CEO.
Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design
I have just recently discovered that my previous post about Commodore BASIC went modestly viral, not only featuring on Hacknernews but getting its own story on Hackaday . Gosh. This in itself has provoked some discussion. Its also resulted in a lot of people telling me that NO COMMODORE WAS…
The Secret Origin of the Action RPG
Who knew that the knowledge of the true progenitor of the action RPG would be hidden in a stuffy basement in Akihabara, Tokyo?
Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019)
A chat with the PornHub development team, about working in the adult website industry, technology, virtual reality, and more.
Data Runner Watch Prototype – Modded Casio F91W
Today I want to show you a watch modification that I've been working on. I'm calling it the Data Runner, and it's another F91W mod, this time going the extra mile to make something functional and nice looking.
The worst tool for the job
Using the best tool for a job may slow things down. It may be "best" in a sense you don't need. The actual best tool might be relatively crude.
Banned math book
The applied math classic Courant & Hilbert was banned in Nazi Germany. The US seized the copyright and published an English edition.
WasmBoxC: Simple, Fast, and VM-Less Sandboxing
The software ecosystem has a lot of useful but unsafe code, and the easier it is to sandbox that code, the moreoften that’ll happen. If it were as simple as ...
Not an Amazon Problem
The NY Times profile quotes me saying “We don’t really have an Amazon problem. What we have is a deep, societal problem with an unacceptable imbalance of power and wealth.” But the URL contained the string “amazon-critic-tim-bray” and the HTML <title> says “Tim Bray Is Not Done With Amazon”. I feel like I’m being…
The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)
I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. Predictably, the move caused …
Bread, How Did They Make It?
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of th…
How GPT3 Works – Visualizations and Animations
Discussions: Hacker News (397 points, 97 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (247 points, 27 comments) Translations: German, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Russian, Turkish The tech world is abuzz with GPT3 hype. Massive language models (like GPT3) are starting to surprise us with their abilities. While not yet…
Writing a file system from scratch in Rust
A file system is responsible for organising and providing an abstraction over the storage devices where the data is physically stored. In this post, we will learn more about the concepts used by file systems, and how they fit together when writing your own.
It’s easier to manage four people than one person
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
Imperial Wars Always Come Home
There’s a person I think about from time to time.